Feminist avant-garde

"With greater energy than any artistic movement before, the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s deconstructed society's image of womanhood, dismantling centuries' worth of projections, stereotypes, and male hegemony. For the first time in the history of art, women, in an act of collective consciousness-raising, took the representation of their sex in visual art into their own hands and unfolded a wide spectrum of sel-determined female identies: provocative and radical, poetic and ironic. Gabriele Schor, director of the SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, coined the term the Feminist Avant-Garde in order to highlight the pioneering achievemetns of these artists. This book presents over six hundred works in the SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection created by forty-eight women artists. Established in Vienna in 2004 by VERBUND AG, Austria's leading electricity provider and one of the largest producers of hydropower in Europe, the collection has two main foci: "Perceptions of Spaces and Places" and the "Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s".